World Youth Day
Links to the pope’s visit to WYD in Portugal:
https://www.vaticannews.va/en.html
Link to RTÉ summary:
https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0806/1398398-pope-francis-portugal/
Similar Posts
Time to prioritise Catholic Social Teaching?
Sean O’Conaill asks ‘who is to address the question of the church’s relevance to the wider spiritual and moral crisis of Irish society?’
Seán Walsh: Storm Trooper
STORM TROOPER Ah, years ago, now. I checked into an inner city hospital: gaunt, red-bricked, Victorian. Creaking all the way from Main Entrance to X Ray, Reception to Theatre, Canteen…
Mulling over Mary Kenny’s new book, Something of Myself and Others
Brendan Hoban offers his thoughts, in his weekly Western People column, on Mary Kenny’s ‘Something of Myself and Others’. He says it is an entertaining and worthwhile read, surely the best insight there is into the life of the carer. Kenny dissects compellingly, in this brutally honest memoir, the lived experience of a carer’s life.
A Voice Worth Listening To
Chris McDonnell writes in this week’s Catholic Times of how even a single voice can disturb “our comfort zone and there is an unease, almost guilt in consequence. The social disruption created by the preaching of the Nazarene was equally unsettling. ‘Listen, you who have ears to hear’. It was true when the Lord spoke those words and is still true now.”
The curious case of the Archbishop’s comments.
Brendan Hoban writing in the Western People suggests that “Part of the problem we have in the Irish Catholic Church is that little respect was given to the critical voices that time and again warned against the icebergs stalking our voyage. A lack of vision, a failure in leadership and an inability to cope with the complexities of a changing world meant that the uncritical voices, especially those that echoed official thinking, were given an inordinate influence in the last few decades. And anyone who didn’t subscribe to the old conservatism was taken out in some shape or form.”
A Time to Dream
Chris McDonnell, in the Catholic Times, lets us know that it is good to have dreams to aim for … that when “memories begin to fracture .. the dreams we once had remain.”
“a Synod called to listen to the voices of South America, is in session. It will have repercussions for the whole Church. Not only will it consider issues specific to that community of our Church, but it will tell us a story of how our dreams are shaped and cared for. We must listen, we must respond, we must care for each other.”
“For, sadly, many sons and daughters of Ireland are drifting away from the practice of the faith; some may even have abandoned God.”
https://www.indcatholicnews.com/news/47750
This was Archbishop Eamon Martin at a Mass for World Youth Day on the Hill of Slane – but why, always, is this day organised in a way that can involve only a tiny proportion of any nation’s young people? Why does it centre always on high-flown addresses from senior clerics – never arranging for every parish everywhere to hear its own young people tell of their needs and hopes and fears – and questions for – the church?
Recently, the BBC highlighted the fact that about 8,000 young people in Northern Ireland are helping to care for ill or disadvantaged family members, according to the last census. Many of those must be Catholic young people – who would presumably have particular difficulty in heading off to Lisbon for World Youth Day. Isn’t that another reason for questioning the way that event is currently conceived and arranged?
Five years after the global synod on youth in 2018 we in Ireland still do not know the findings of research into the minds of Irish young people, research that reportedly took place everywhere – including Ireland – in preparation for that, in 2017. In 2022 as part of diocesan synodality discussions, every Irish Catholic school leaving year group could have been invited to submit a digest of its own hopes and fears for the church – but that didn’t happen either.
All of which points to the conclusion that senior churchmen fear what young people would tell their elders if encouraged everywhere to do so, frankly – and so prefer that the rest of us should hear only FROM churchmen ABOUT young people – on ‘World Youth Day’.
Question: In how many parishes in Ireland was World Youth Day 2023 even mentioned this August?
Meanwhile synodality is apparently ‘on hold’ – even though issues like the failure of the HSE to provide care for so many suffering children and young people is lamented by Ireland’s Children’s Ombudsman and crying out for discussion and protest by all of us.
Are Catholic Christian faith – and the People of God – supposed to be detached from all that? What the Children’s Ombudsman seems to be reporting is a colossal failure of pastoral care by the Irish secular state, but who in the church is noticing?
And what about the relevance of Christian faith for young people suffering judgementalism, abuse or exploitation on the Internet?
So much for synodality to be attending to these times – while church buildings increasingly go silent and unused. High time for Catholic ‘World Youth Day’ to catch itself on, to become truly synodal everywhere, and to ‘get real’!
Yes Sean I agree with your sentiments. I also wonder what kind of structures, resources are available in parishes to the youth who were blessed to participate in WYD?
What concrete ways are parishes providing to these youth to really live out the message they heard? Do they see this message lived out in their parishes? Let us begin…